This showed up in a post Junkyard Blog did on Thursday or Friday. It's an interesting point. Also interesting is the fact that the acronym "OETR" which shows up in one of the memos appears to be nonsensical when used in that context. Jeff Goldstein at Protein Wisdom has a big post about it.

I misread that as 'disturbed intelligence' and thought the link probably went back to my site. But alas.....

I think the memos have been debunked until CBS shores them up with something. So the battle has moved to forcing them to reveal where the memos came from.

National Review has pointed out that USA Today also received a copy from the memos via an unidentified source. So either could crack, but CBS and Rather should be receiving the most pressure.

Finding additional, less prominent errors obscures the issue and might give them easy points of rebuttal.

BTW, my bet is feedback has been around for a long time, originating among engineers well before it went into common parlance (meaning a bunch of military guys likely used it before the mainstream).

Ace--

I'm with Kronos. The officers/engineers I work with use geeky words that haven't even been invented yet. Military types will kluge words together all the time.

Interesting angle, but fairly weak given the OED.

FYI-- you have got to read Demure Thoughts, or stop by my site for the latest Kerry fun-quote via the NYT:

"When Mr. Kerry was pressed about how he would handle the threat of a North Korean nuclear test if he was in the Oval Office, he declined to be prescriptive, other than to say that the issue would probably have to be taken to the United Nations Security Council. "Hypothetical questions are not real..."

You just can't make this stuff up. Of course, I had to write a top ten for that one.

Cheers,
Dave
Garfield Ridge

Yes, I agree, the docs have been proven as forgeries already. Let's get on with the who-dunn-it jigsaw puzzle that's progressing so nicely on the 2 hot threads - the two started by Ace with the sirens flaring. Unfortunately, they are so far down the page now, it's difficult to get to them quickly. Our thoughts are faster than the speed of light, so the new threads are obscuring the great stuff in those two.

Ace, is there some way to get them back up close to the top, under the great Spectator article?

"USA TODAY obtained copies of the documents independently soon after the 60 Minutes segment aired Wednesday, from a person with knowledge of Texas Air National Guard operations. The person refused to be identified out of fear of retaliation."

It's a well-known fact that LC Killian was a hard-core Hendrix fan, as were most of the TANG at the time. Doubtless they were well acquainted with the term 'feedback', as well as 'dig', 'trip', and 'far-out'.

I'd say pilots of that era would be comfortable using the word feedback to describe cause-effect actions when using controls in the cockpit.

It's well known that words are often in use for considerable periods of time before they first make an appearance in print. Having said that, my recollection is that feedback, in the sense used here, was not really au courant until the eighties.

Kronos is right - it's not only guitars that can feedback, of course, but any live amplified sound. If you have a microphone amplified by a speaker, and if the mic starts picking up what's coming out of the speaker, you get feedback ("is this thing on?" EEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!...) So feedback has existed (and been commonplace) as long as public-address systems have been around (i.e. the 20's & 30's at least). Every Army base has one (remember Radar on M.A.S.H.?) To the best of my knowledge the term feedback has always been the term for it, even if it didn't get into the dictionary later (I could be wrong). But I think the feeback angle is a non-starter, respectfully.

Stumbo,

Thanks. I'm trying to put together a post with the various references recently made to who the source was, and that will be one of them.

I know someone else provided a similar link.

Kevin - Good point. The jets Killian flew used P-I, P-I-D, and pure I/P instrumentation and control devices. Planes were reliant on such feedback loops and behavior, and pilots and engineering folks would know - Feedback was an engineering term in use in that "sphere".

But!!! -

Such terms do not cross over from one "technicalese" field (engineering, gal secretary pool, docs, computer geeks)into the generic official, management, or informal vernacular of an organization or society until they "spark" into popularity - then spread like wildfire and become widely accepted in a disbursed internal culture (Air Force, college kids) or popular society. But WHEN they do, they show up everywhere and modern linguistics people can look at records of the event pin down the year or even the month at which "phatt", "cool", "rad", "feedback", "ROTFLMAO", "McCarthyite", "Who knows? Only the Shadow knows" came into popular usage, then in some cases, fade...remember "groovy" "intense" or who the Shadow was?

I was in the military in the late 70's, and I never heard "feedback" outside an engineering context. But that was the Navy. It's possible that "feedback" was used in a human interaction context internally confined to the AF or TANG, but I doubt it. I seem to remember "feedback" coming into the mouths of academia and middlemanagement and touchy feely psychology types all of a sudden in the mid-80s.

So congrats to the person who 1st noted "feedback"!! You appear to have found yet another nail to pound into Dan Rather's coffin. And odd, apparantly modern words or phrases appearing in a document 2 decades too early are as scientifically damning in their way of pointing out a forgery as finding computer generated fonts and layout or noting a guy referenced as a superior retired over a year before the memo was written.

I was a Navy medical service corps officer at the time in question. The only use of the word feedback dealt with the overloading of electronic circuts in radiology Xray heads. The word feedback was not an accepted term for 'response' in any military document in the early 70's. Officers using slang terminology in official records were subject to reprimand. While memos in the corporate world follow whatever format the writer creates, the military requires following manditory formats established by the Pentagon. The only exception is documents written in active combat zones, or within a hostile environment. An a Northerner, I consider Texas a hostile environment, but I doubt that the Pentagon does.

Just an odd note - I remember from a book, Peter Wright's "Spycatcher", that he used the term "howl-round" to describe the use of what we Yanks called "feedback" to detect hidden microphones for MI-5.

So the use of the term feedback for having the mike too close to the speaker is not universal.

I couldn't finish that book, Sage. I thought it was going to be THE BEST BOOK I'D EVER READ, and then, halfway through, put it down and never picked it back up.

poker me up